Letters & Sounds Questions

Hi, we have just started using Letters and Sounds (we are in Australia), and I am trying to piece together an overview of the order we will teach it in. I have never used it, so have some questions for the wise UK teachers in this group! Hoping someone can shed some light!

Doing the first set of sounds, s a t p, do you start teaching blending and segmenting? If not, in which set do you start teaching blending and segmenting? Seems like you could get going with 'sat', 'pat' etc...

Are you teaching high frequency words, independent of tricky words and decodable words? Meaning do they get any special attention? Or are they taught incidentally, amongst the decodable words?

In Phase 3, when you start teaching the vowel digraphs e.g. ai, ee, igh, oa do you teach them in a group or in isolation? Have you grouped the vowel digraphs differently (e.g. r controlled vowels together) or left the grouping together?

How quickly do you introduce the tricky words? Letters and Sounds is quite slow - do you go at that pace?

Phase 5 seems to go on forever, do you just skip to the alternative spellings or go through each of the new letter sounds etc?